


Letters to Nowhere Man

by linkzeldi



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: At the end they go to disney land, Body Horror, Elias is the narrator, Eye Trauma, He's very mean and passive agressive, M/M, So like it's mainly a fluffy romantic comedy, Then it goes back to being fluffy and silly, Then there are some horrifying parts in the middle, and like the differences between elias and jonah magnus, this is also a character study of elias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 21,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24894910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linkzeldi/pseuds/linkzeldi
Summary: After a particularly bad fight Peter Lukas ghosts Elias Bouchard. Elias writes several letters to Peter in an attempt to win him back, and ends up telling Peter his life story in the process of trying to woo him.
Relationships: Barnabas Bennett/Jonah Magnus, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 23
Kudos: 34





	1. Letter 1

_ He's a real nowhere man _

_ Sitting in his nowhere land _

_ Making all his nowhere plans for nobody _

♟️

Where are you, my dear nowhere man? 

You must appreciate the great lengths I’ve gone to contact you. Of course you’ll never appreciate it, you hate any kind of affection that I or anyone tries to show you, but I demand you appreciate it anyway.    
  
I receive letters, I do not write them. I am sought after not the seeker. Of course you know this. I have shown you all of the piles of letters I received back and the day that I have kept for a hundred years, out of some thought it might make you jealous. It didn’t, of course. “Good for you,” was all you said looking at the letters. As if to say “If so many people want you so badly, then they can just have you.” Please, Peter. You cannot get rid of me that easily. 

After exhausting every possible resource to find you you are still lost to me. I’ve been reduced to this, sitting on my desk with pen and ink well and enduring this prolonged humiliation as I practically beg you to return. I have practically stabbed myself with the tip of my pen between two ribs, right about where my heart should be, and where in your chest I assume there is just a thick and empty fog, and bled my feelings all over the paper for you. Does this make you happy? No, of course not, nothing makes you happy. 

I wouldn’t have to deal with this if you just set up a proper email account, but you are an insufferable oaf when it comes to technology. I have told you upwards of a thousand times that the internet provides you with everything you can desire, the illusions of closeness while in actuality being far apart, anonymity, a lack of consequences for any social interaction, and do you listen? No, no, of course not. There’s fog between your ears as well.    
  
I looked for you.   
Oh, don’t be flattered. Take that statement with the creeping paranoia it was intended. I dislike when anything escapes my eyes. Picture it, a thousand eyes searching for the same man. They are like a thousand lighthouses trying to pierce the fog. No, maybe more like the searchlight from on top of a prison tower. The beams of light cut the fog like a knife and disperse it.    
  
Looking at the world through one pair of eyes is just so droll, is it not? Everyone sees the world in a slightly different light. For example Martin, shy, thoughtful Martin. He never looks directly at anyone. Even when he wears his glasses his vision is fogged. Today, he brought coffee to the desk of his new boss. He checked not once, not twice, but about one thousand times to see if his boss drank any of his coffee. When he saw that the coffee he worked so hard and slaved over a coffee pot remained completely untouched, his eyes fell in such bitter disappointment. 

Tim is someone who appears so close to others, but is far away. It’s why all that running away is so stupid. The loneliest place in the world is right next to someone else. He laughs off the idea of office romance whenever it is mentioned, and then when he thought no one was looking he stared at her. Everything changes depending on the eye of the beholder. Tim looked at her with such detail, as if to carefully memorize every detail of her face. The way her thick dark hair was always tied off in a messy bun, as if she came in to work every day half asleep from staying up the previous night reading. The hair she kept tucked behind her ear. The golden earrings she wore around the gentle curve of her earlobe. Her thick eyebrows, button nose, brown hair, brown eyes. He looked at her as if he was afraid her face might change some day. As if he could blink, and the next moment she would be someone else, someone he didn’t recognize. As if the reality in front of him was nothing more than a dream that could disappear at any second. 

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen someday soon, it would be most unfortunate. 

Oh Elias, you say. Don’t you have anything better to do then spy on your employees?

Not when you’re not around.    
The days are empty and we try to fill them with mere trifles.    
But you hate that don’t you? You’d rather they remain empty.

Of course I could rely on unscrupulous means to find your location. It would be considered cheating in our little games, but since when have either of us been the type to follow the rules? At this moment as I write I am looking through your eyes. Your power can’t block me from that. I see the exact same horizon you do.    
  
There are a thousand stars that dot the sky, and no light to obscure them. The sky is a perfect darkness, black ink spilled everywhere and you stand at the center of it all. How you wish to be blotted out by some ink stain so no one will look, no one will see anymore. It’s the same reason you grew such a ridiculous white beard, and refuse to comb that salt and pepper hair of yours, you want others to see as little of your face as possible when forced to interact with them.    
  
You’d rather go unnoticed. Even though that’s impossible for you, big hulking figure that you are. A man so tall stood there on the deck of his ship, hunching his shoulders, arms crossed over his chest holding his hat, he tried to look tiny. That’s why you like the stars so much isn’t it? You look up at a million tiny pinpricks of light and you feel so infinitesimally small. Then you breathe, and like some great chimney, white smoke comes out your frosted breath. You like big places. You like standing at the center of them. How much you want to drown in the icy sea all around you.    
  
In the dark the clouds look black and white. They are more like a monochromatic painting, then the real thing, art to be stared at and get lost in. They rolled out of the way carried by the harsh winds, and then the moon was there, the lonely thing that it was. 

What? Do you think I’m going to make some comparison between you and the moon? Don’t be so trite.    
  
You sit there and watch the moon, the stars, the sky and the clouds, and you are satisfied by this because you are the single most boring man on earth. Then, I roll my eyes and change my perspective. A man approaches you from behind and calls out your name. You talk about sea charts, or whatever people on boats talk about. Even that small conversation seems like it’s too much for you. You avoid his eyes. Your fingers wrinkle your hand as they curl and dig into the cloth of it. You laugh it all off, and try so hard to appear casual, so nobody will notice the nervous, clumsy man they are talking to. Big Oaf. They might as well be talking to a white haired yeti wearing a great big coat only pretending to be a ship captain. 

They used to say that taking a photograph would steal your soul.    
That’s why you avoid their eyes. You do not the image of yourself reflected in the pupils of another and trapped there. But eventually the crew member full of dogged determination finally caught your fleeing gaze.    
  
Then in that eye you saw a familiar gleam. Thousands of miles away, I smiled at my desk. You knew who watched you through someone else’s eyes.    
  
Your face became firm as if carved out of stone. You put your great hand on his shoulder, and curled your fingers around slowly. The man who had no idea what was happening was terrified. Your face drifts closer and closer and soon it becomes the only thing clear for the rest of the world is fog. Every wrinkle on your face became apparent. Eyes that are old, but not wise. They’re big, and blue, and so wide just like a child… have your eyes changed at all since you were a child? Are those the same eyes you stared at your mother with?    
  
You spoke in a voice like the rolling waves.   
Your anger is hidden far below the surface of the water, and wouldn’t be apparent to most but it is like an iceberg, yes, all of your anger is frozen but it’s still there.    
  
“I’d like to be alone, Elias.” 

You say.    
  
“Please leave.”

You finally look me in the eye to show the sincerity of your statement. Eye contact is a dangerous, dangerous thing. But lovely. God, so lovely.  
  
I leave you for now,  
Sincerely,   
Elias Bouchard of the Magnus Institute  
PS. And really, Peter, naming your boat the Tundra. It’s like you’re begging for an iceberg to hit you. 


	2. Letter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Halley's comet didn't show up until 1836, and Barnabas died in 1824 but let's pretend this is an alternate universe where the Halley's Comet had a slightly different 75 year cycle.

Nowhere man, 

There is a pile of bones in my office.   
If word of them were to ever get out, it would be a terrible scandal, and I would have to do a lot of paperwork to cover it up. Why do you keep them so close, then?    
They seem to me to be terribly lonely bones.

Have I ever told you the story of Barnabas Bennett? Ninety nine times, you say? Well then, I’ll tell it to you for the hundredth.    
  
I watched a man die once. You’ve watched hundreds of people die, you say. Well, yes, but this one was special.    
  
(And do you see what you’ve done to me? I am now imagining you sitting next to me having a conversation. I sit at my desk pondering what you might say if you were here. I should really stop or I might give the impression a silver backed gorilla like you is actually wanted.)

♟️   
  
Do you remember the first time you truly looked at a person? The moment you saw them and acknowledged that whatever future you were to experience, they would be an immutable part of it, that it was not mere coincidence you met. The two of you are not mere bit players in each other’s stories but rather each other’s most important supporting character on the page?    
  
(Of course you don’t, you spend all your time staring at those huge feet of yours, you ninny.)

Barnabas Bennett never seemed to know what to do in crowds, and Jonah Magnus was the opposite; he flourished in them. He was much like a weed who grew up in the middle of the garden, in that no matter who he was surrounded by he would grow stronger, taller than all of them. He also caused the flowers near him to wither, but that wasn’t so noticeable back then. Barnabas was like… a flower that only grows in the lonely shade, one that requires special attention.    
  
Usually such a flower would go unnoticed.    
The crowds the night of Haley’s comment were practically trampling over him. Flowers trampled under foot. He felt especially suffocated by them, like all of the open mouths chattering were sucking up his air to breathe with.    
  


He clutched the invitation between his hands as a reminder he was asked to be here, wanted. His eyes searched. The year was 1816 and he was invited to a gathering of a few wealthy, elite men to view Halley’s comet together on the predicted day of its arrival. It was a gathering outdoors in the middle of the night, every candle had been blown out so the stars would shine all the brighter. 

Important people were in attendance, Maxwell Rayner (or whatever he was calling himself then), Mordechai Lucas, but he hadn’t been introduced to that yet. The man who had invited him was Jonah Magnus.    
  
He actually knew Jonah before this. Long before this in fact. They were childhood friends. Yes, it’s funny to believe Jonah could spend so much time with a person without growing bored of him, but 

the truth was Jonah had barely even looked the way of the friend who was always at his side.   
  
Jonah had a way of looking at people, ever since they were young Barnabas had thought what scary eyes. He looked at people like they weren’t there, like they weren’t even worth being in his orbit. However if he did look at you only for a moment you might feel like Copernicus was wrong, and you might actually be the center of the universe.    
  
Holding Johah’s hand in his own was much like holding a double edged knife between his fingers, where both sides cut him, but Barnabas was someone who wanted to be cut because at least the pain of that wound would be feeling something. He was so distant from everybody else, every other sensation.    
  
You might call him naive, or oblivious.    
  
A smile formed on his cherry red lips. He always blushed such vivid colors, that if Dracula existed before 1890, those cheeks would be a prime target for his fangs. He finally caught a glimpse of Jonah, his mouth opened, but he said nothing when he noticed Mordechai was taking up all of Jonah’s attention. Whatever he was about to say fell from his lips as a wistful and pathetic sigh.    
  
That entire night Barnabas stalked Jonah. He didn’t know anybody else at the party, and he was beginning to believe he didn’t know Jonah all that well either. A childhood friend. A childhood stranger. Jonah was perfectly aware that he was being followed. Every time Barnabas looked at him, he looked back just for a single frozen moment in time.    
  
Barnabas brought his frozen fingers to his mouth and breathed on them to warm them. Even if touching Jonah was like caressing the edge of a knife, at least blood running over his hands, washing them red, would spare him from the chill of that night. All he needed to do was reach forward and touch Jonah’s hand, snatch him away, but he couldn’t do that, and so the party dragged on into the long hours of the night. The men kept squinting at the sky waiting for the comet to show itself, and Barnabas squinted in search of Jonah.

Music started playing at some point. Then Barnabas saw him, Jonah Magnus was dancing with some towering man that completely surrounded him. White hair, milky white eyes, faced lost in the curls of his beard (You look so much like your grandfather Peter, one might assume I have a type). For just a small moment Barnabas’ eyes blurred with the frustration of tears, and he thought Mordechai looked like some great, white fog, that threatened to swallow Jonah.   
  
Barnabas suddenly cut in between the dance, and placed an arm between them. It was an incredibly rude thing to do, and so unlike him, it even took Jonah who liked to act like he saw everything coming, by surprise. That small opening Jonah gave as he gasped was all Barnabas needed.    
  
He interlocked his fingers with Jonah, lined their hands up, aligned their hips, and secured his other hand on his waist, and then danced away with him. They had danced together before. In fact Jonah was the one who taught him how to dance. It was just that, Barnabas had never led in a dance, not even once.    
  
That night he took the first step and Jonah could do nothing but follow. He spun Jonah away from him, and then as if missing Jonah terribly, pulled him back to his side. Everyone else was performing the most boring waltz imaginable, so they were dancing quite differently to a tune that only the two of them seemed to hear.    
  
Barnabas stepped forward, and Jonah stepped back.    
Barnabas was a wave, and Jonah the shore he crashed against.    
Barnabas ebbed, and Jonah flowed.    
They spun, spun, spun and the stars in the sky above them were like one of those children’s toys, a kaleidoscope, spinning around them. All of the stars became streaks of light that blurred together. Jonah let his eye wander away and looked up at the sky above him, he decided in that moment that all of the stars in the sky, the inexhaustible, incomprehensible, unutterable cosmos all amounted to mere background scenery for his dance. They were a stage and he was the one dancing upon it, standing in the center of the spotlight.    
  
Then his eyes drifted back as if drawn by gravity to rest on Barnabas once more. Their eyes were two heavenly bodies set in their head, glittering, glittering, glittering, and attracting each other into their orbit. 

Barnabas shivered then, and it wasn’t the cold but Jonah that made him shiver. He had such scary eyes, even after all this time. He knows, Barnabas thought. He knows just what Barnabas was thinking right at this moment, and he knew exactly the effect he had on people - so scary. Barnabas felt crushed by those eyes. Halley’s comet could fall out of the sky, collide with the earth, and crush him right now and he would probably not even notice in the few sparkling moments before his death.    
  
For he was so happy.    
A lifetime together, a lifetime together but apart, close but distant and Jonah Magnus finally looked his way.

The comet did in fact come that night, but neither of the gentlemen saw it. Jonah’s eyes behind his owl-like glasses belonged inexorably to one person. The comet was just a passing fancy _. I’ll catch it next time, _ Jonah thought,  _ If I live long enough.  _ Then he was pulled back into the dance with Barnabas. 

♟️   
  
Now, now.   
I didn’t tell you that story to make you jealous, Peter. I know if you got jealous that easily then this game wouldn’t be very fun to play. It was just a memory I had just now as I was writing in the dark, and pondering if at this moment are you looking at the same stars as I was.    
  
When was the first time you saw me, Peter?   
I mean, really, truly, saw me?    
When did I become Elias Bouchard to you, rather than just Jonah Magnus?    
Or have you never been looking at me all this time?   
I don’t know which answer I want to hear more, they’re both equally fun and would tickle me so.    
  
Let’s save the rest of the story for next time.   
Your long suffering friend,    
Elias Bouchard. 


	3. Letter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That's not how you fence, boys.
> 
> Also, this scene is very specifically prompted by ideas in Pingu / osheets_'s art. This fic is intended as a gift for them and I wanted to give life to the scenes depicted in their art so I ended up incorporating a lot of their ideas and tried to tie them together into a story.

Dear Nowhere Man, 

You will probably laugh at me if I tell you this, but I keep Baranbas’ bones in a filing cabinet. It’s the only place I can guarantee that nobody else will look, because nobody seems to share my enjoyment for the filing system of this dear archive.    
  
I’m not telling this story to make you jealous, because to become jealous you have to actually want or need something and you require nothing. I am pretty sure you do not even eat. You simply subist yourself on sea water, and that pipe you smoke. (Really, smoking a pipe? What are you two hundred years old? Oh, that’s me). 

You often ask me why so many people get close to me, even knowing what I am. That is because you’ve never had the exquisite pleasure of being my friend. As you’ve told me many times we are not friends. Well, you know how rich old men are, they’ll keep slowly sipping the wine down even if halfway through you tell them it’s poisoned. 

♟️   
  
Barnabas brought the glass to his lips, again and again, and willfully drank it all down.    
Sometimes when he was kissing him, Jonah Magnus thought just for a moment.    
He is not kissing poison.   
He is kissing me.    
But, then he would remember himself.    


Fencing had been his hobby since he was a boy. It was the one sport where being short, and swift and having a lithe body seemed to count for something. He had to excel in something to be considered a son of the magnus household, and Jonah found that in this life, and it seemed every life after that one he would be born as someone shorter than all of the boys around him.    
  
Even Barnabas grew taller than him as they grew up together, the traitor. Jonah took an interest in fencing, and Barnabas who had an interest in Jonah followed. They would spend long hours training alone together, except on this day where Jonah had invited Mordechai Lucas to accompany them.    
  
Mordechai knew the reason why he was there, and knew Jonah was just using him, but he went along with it because a transactional relationship was one perfectly understandable to him. He was relieved when his parents picked a bride for him because that meant he did not have to bother with falling in love. 

Mordechai appeared that day with a blue cape around his shoulders, his frostbitten hair styled back so it would not fall in front of his eyes. He wore a blue vest and white pants. He didn’t bother to wear any kind of padding, most likely because the heft of his body would absorb any blow. When he drew his saber he pulled it out of his cane, and then whipped it out. You Lukases for all you hate attention, you sure do love your drama.    


Jonah watched from behind owl-eyed glasses with circular lenses that made his eyes appear much bigger than they were. He wasn’t watching Mordechai, but Barnabas, always Barnabas.    
  
Barnabas surprised him.    
You might ask why Jonah kept a man of so little use and consequence around for so long, and that was why, it was a special sort of feeling when someone you have known your entire life manages to surprise you over and over again. People don’t have one or two faces, they have thousands of them and just when they grow tiresome and predictable they will show a face you never expected to see. That’s why you’re so terrified of them, aren’t you old boy?

Barnabas marched right up to Lukas and challenged him to the first match of the day. Jonah laughed, he had the laugh of a faerie who found everything in the world of humans deeply amusing. Then he said whoever won the first match could spar against him, offering himself up as some sort of prize.    
  
There was jealousy in Barnabas’ eyes, and utter indifference in Lukas’. Jonah wondered if Barnabas envisioned himself as the hero of a novel.They stood parallel to each other, and the two fencing sabers, twanged and vibrated in the empty air in anticipation.    
  
Shing.    
  
Every single hit that Barnabas dare make, Lukas batted away with his saber. It was like trying to kill a great white whale with a toothpick. Did that metaphor tickle you pink, Peter? You sure do love boring books about the sea. 

Barnabas’ muscles were drawn tight under his skin. His whole body tensed, so tight it looked like the tiniest touch would break him. His body looked almost elfin in comparison, so sleek. He moved, heel toe, heel toe, but for all he was trying to appear ferocious saber in hand he looked more like a nervous doe quivering. 

Mordechai finally swung seriously, and his saber stabbed through the air just where Barnabas had been a moment ago. Barnabas threw his whole body back, twisting it, in a show of flexibility that had Jonah staring at the subtle motion of his hips. 

Barnabas thrust his sword forward standing on the tips of his toes as he did so. The sabert bent against his chest. Mordechai suddenly looked insulted at the notion of a lamb scoring even a single point against an old lion like him. He still carried his saber in one hand, but his other, free hand went towards Barnabas’ neck. It was strange, how such a large hand had such a gentle caress. It didn’t force, it invited Barnabas to tilt his head back. A finger tucked under the curve of his chin, and a thumb pressed on his lower lip. With his other hand he rested his fencing saber on Barnabas’ shoulder. Barnabas reached out with his small hand, and curled his finger’s around the blade of the saber and simply looked on unaware of what else to do.    
  
His eyes were so lonely in that moment, you would have been jealous, Peter.    
He tried to say something but all that came out was thin, wispy, smoke. 

So, Jonah spoke up for him.    
Mordechai stopped at the sound of an applause.   
That was always a good signifier that the show was over.    
  
“It looks like Barnabas won the match, and Mordechai is a sore loser. Didn't your parents teach you to be graceful and dignified even in defeat?”   
  
He said, as he finished clapping.    
  
“My parents didn’t teach me anything.”    
  
Mordechai responded and announced to the entire world that he was in a sulky mood, and then he dropped Barnabas on the floor. Barnabas caught his breath, and then had a blank, milky look in his eyes like he had forgotten what had just happened.    
  
Jonah stepped between them, and cut into their dance. It was his turn. Barnabas picked up his fencing saber once more, and slowly spread his legs apart to take stance, and Jonah did the same in turn.    
  
They never wore masks. Jonah told him not to. He wanted to see the face up close and personal of the person he danced with. Especially the eyes. Barnabas has blue eyes, that he wanted to pluck from the boy’s skull with the same compulsion a magpie had towards a shiny thing.    
  
Blue eyes, flecked with grey.    
Clouds reflecting on the surface of the water.   
You could drown in those eyes.   
Jonah Magnus had a distinct fear of drowning, from a childhood incident where he got too deep in the water and didn't know how to swim, he swallowed too much down, and his father was yelling and he coughed, and coughed, and tried to breathe and... he thought if it was Barnabas drowning might be alright. 

Barnabas wore his clothes so tight that Jonah could see the ways his muscles worked underneath his skin as he thrust his sword forward. His legs turned, his thighs flexed, and he put his entire body into the motion. He was so annoyed with Jonah’s games, that he looked like he wanted nothing more than to bury his blade deep inside the other man and that made Jonah smile.    
  
The first swing came and Jonah dodged, he moved like he had no weight at all, pixie like. The sword hit against his and then rolled off of him like a wave as he ducked underneath it. Jonah had already spotted the hole to enter into and crumble the other man’s defenses on the follow through. He with his knees bent low, came up with a sudden strike. He stepped past Barnabas like there was no lines between them at all. He stepped to avoid Barnabas' toes. It was him and Barnabas, the few centimeters between them, and then his saber that poked him in the chest.    
  
That was a point for him.    
Jonah lingered a little longer than he was welcome, just to make Barnabas uncomfortable. Barnabas’ face wasted already, and he was sweating, although they had barely gotten started. 

He had the strangest brown hair that fell wherever they pleased on his forehead. Jonah had seen Barnabas fuss with his hair for hours, and it would still look like he had just gotten out of bed. He always expressed every feeling with his whole face, especially eyes, vivid and lively eyes that were never still just like the ocean was always rocking back and forth. Jonah who concealed his every expression sometimes felt jealous of what an open book Barnabas was.   
  
There were those who often wondered what Jonah who tired of others so quickly even saw in so plain and rustic a man.    
  
What did Achilles see in Patroclus?    
Anybody could have fastened his armor for him.   
Patroclus could have been anybody, but Patroclus was his.    
  
Barnabas grew more flustered and more frustrated and tried harder than ever to gain a point this time. He squared up and stood with his v shaped chest held proudly and definitely out. He looked a bit like a spanish man inviting another to the tango.    
  
This time it was he who stepped past Jonah’s defenses and got close. He swung his silver sabre in a brilliant arc around his head. His form was perfect, it was art itself. That was why, Jonah kissed him. He wrapped his free arm around the man’s hip, let his saber fall to the side and be caught by Barnabas’ gloved hand, and then kissed him. His Patroclus. He tasted greek oil in the boy’s lips, though that was probably just sweat.    
  
Barnabas simply froze.    
Jonah kept his eyes open. He always did to watch the faces others made as he kissed them. Barnabas let his eyes slowly fall closed. Jonah’s eyes hadn’t truly opened yet at that point, yet he could see something like a haze, or even a mirage, that he convinced himself was Barnabas’ soul leaving his body. He might as well. Because this body he was currently pressed against belong to him, it was his.    
  
Mine. Mine. Mine.    
He thought, kissing him and licking his lips.    
Barnabas for his part tilted his head back and unconsciously began to drink Jonah as if he were wine, determined to swallow all of him.    
  
Perhaps it would have been kinder if Jonah had just let Mordechai swallow up Barnabas a lot earlier. Instead of dying suddenly and unaware he picked a slow death of poison. 

Oh, I won the fencing match that time.   
I never lost a fencing match to Barnabas, because I cheat.   
But, you knew that already.    
  
Yours sincerely,    
Elias Bouchard.    



	4. Letter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The flower symbolism was once again incorporated from Pingu / Stevie / osheets_' ideas.

**Hydrangeas -** _ arrogance and boastfulness.  _

_ English men used to give them to women who rejected them to accuse them of frigidity.  _

♟️   
  
My very annoying and hard to locate Nowhere Man, 

Did you know I have a tendency to isolate myself?   
Now, now, don’t laugh, Peter. I loathe every part of you, but I find your laugh particularly annoying. Ho, ho, ho, you laugh like you’re bloody freaking santa claus.    
It really is a shame that I am so clever and irresistibly charming that you end up laughing so much around me.    
  
And now here is the part where you mutter to yourself. “I am laughing at you…”   
Do try to be less predictable. There are so few things that are charming about you, but your ability to fog up my eyes is one of them.    
  
I read people like books, you know that. I grow tired of looking at those who are easy to read. Yet, I always delighted in reading every single emotion on his face. Perhaps, he was less of a book to me, and more of a flower pressed in between the pages perfectly preserved.    
  


♟️   
  


Jonah liked to to always be spying on others behind his glasses, but didn’t like to be looked at. It was a terrible paradox inside of him that caused him a great deal of distress. When he reached his limit he would lock himself in his room and send away all gentleman callers.    
  
This was Regency Era London, so that kind of dramatic behavior was actually quite common. People are so serious nowadays. He wriggled around in white sheets trying to hide himself. He looked like a caterpillar struggling in his chrysalis, trying to tear through the transparent film all around him that separated him from the world. 

That child was too eager to be born. He’d cut his way out of the mother’s womb. He was curled up like an infant after all. Even though, if he emerged from the chrysalis with walls so thin, it could be made of Micah, or a transparent glass, he wouldn’t be ready to fly yet. He would be some half-formed thing between worm and butterfly. His face half melted off, his arms curled into gnarly things like old tree branches with only the barest skeletal resemblance to wings. That’s what happens in a chrysalis, melt and reform, melt and reform, it’s a constant state of change. He would crawl out of the muck and the ooze like first creature climbed out of the primordial soup, and not resemble anything currently alive. And the eyes. His own eyes would be sewn shut, or unable to open like an infant’s, or even gauged out. Do you know of tryphobia? His flesh would be covered in holes for where the eyes were supposed to go and had not yet been planted on his being, and it would look like someone had dug holes all over him.    


Holes, holes, holes. He could see the holes in other people, and the holes in his own knowledge like physical missing chunks in his brain, and how the wind whispered so sweetly through them promising to tell him secrets. 

He felt something wriggling around inside of him. They were like worms that dug around in the layers of his epidermis like it was soil, and then with their microscopic size teeth chewed on his veins like they were roots int the earth. Do you know what the mouth of a leech looks like? It’s just a hole in their face, with rings and rings of teeth. Something like that, yes, some feeling, or maybe several feelings gnawed at him rendering him unable to to leave his bed. He didn’t know if he was worm, or butterfly, but felt that he was neither, he was nothing, and he didn’t know anything. He wanted to know everything, he wanted to be everything.    
  
He was slowly suffocating inside of his chrysalis, the blankets were smothering and for a few moments he thought he might never even be born. He had to hide this from others of course, he was, always, always hiding from others.   
  
His preferred method of hiding was to surround himself. It was hard to pick out one particular rose, in a bouquet of roses. He captivated everyone’s eyes, and so that way they wouldn’t look at him. He did that because he knew, the closer you are to someone the more blind you become to their faults. He knew that because of Barnabas. Nobody is… was… would ever be closer.    
  
Barnabas?   
Barnabas was at the door.    
There were flowers in his hands, arranged in a messy bouquet.    
They were blue flowers the exact same shade of color of his eyes.   
  
This was incredibly foolish of him because Jonah never accepted flowers from anyone.    
  
I hate flowers, do you know that?   
Yes, you laugh. Then you say you also hate sunshine, and puppies, and kittens, and everything good or sweet about this world you petty villain.    
  
I hate flowers.    
There are no flowers that do not wilt, but there are flowers that do not blossom. This world is absolutely wicked, of course it is, it’s filled with men like me.    
  
Now, Barnabas was dangling one of those blue flowers just under Jonah’s nose as he stood in the doorway, blanket still drawn over his head like a shawl, wearing the same owl-eyed glasses he never seemed to take off.    
  
“What is this?”

  
“A flower… Um, well they’re pretty. I thought you’d like one.” 

“I don’t like anything.”   
  
“I know, Jonah- “ Barnabas gave a small chuckle, and then made a face like it was difficult for him to breathe. His face was entirely red and he was sweating, and he lifted up the blue flowers even higher, as if he might hide his face behind him. He could not be making more of a mess of this if he tried.   
  
But oh well, messes can be fun.    
  
“Do you know?” Jonah remarked sharply, head tipped to the side.   
  
“Well, er- I guess I don’t.” 

Jonah with a greedy hand, plucked a single flower. He held it like it were a precious jewel, and not some easily breakable thing he could tear apart in his fingers like it was nothing. “You do know the meaning of these flowers, don’t you?”   
  
“Well, not really. I just sort of found them and picked them at random.”   
  
“Hydrangeas, arrogance, boastful, vanity, they produce fine flowers but very little seeds.”    
  
“Oh, looks like I got lucky and guessed right on accident.”    
  
“Men give them to frigid women, tell me do you think I’m cold?”   
  
“Well, you got that blanket on-”    
  
“Apparently, you gave me flowers to tell me everything you dislike about me.” 

“I got you flowers that symbolizes everything I like, you know…” He fumbled as if he was searching for some deeply poetic sentiment that might save him, but found none. “All of it.” 

And Jonah the preening owl looked at the flower he was still holding onto, like he could not decide whether or not to devour it now or later. He reached forward and then tucked the flower stem behind Barnabas’ ear. “There, it’s the same loathsome color of your eyes.”   
  
“I know you don’t ever mean what you say.”   
  
“Are you accusing me of dishonesty?”    
  
“Yes, yes I am.” 

“What a terrible friend I have, here to insult and mock me in my hour of need.” He let the blanket slide from his head. Jonah imagined just for a moment that the gesture was like the removal of a bridal veil. 

  
“You don’t need me, you don’t need anyone, Jonah.” 

“Ridiculous, of course I need you. I need you to show me the place where you found these flowers, I want to see more of them, and you surrounded by them. Yes, I think, I’m just in need of a constitution that will cure my condition.” 

♟️

  
Whatever might attract a scoundrel like me to a good man like Barnabas Bennett, you ask?   
Wait, you’re not asking.    
Oh, I am dancing in front of you, and putting on a show trying to get your attention, the least you could do is pretend to care, Peter.    
  
Barnabas was lonely, but he didn’t seem alone. He was perfectly content with everyone looking away from him.

He’s talented, sincere, and soft hearted.   
He’s dazzling.    
I, in my discontent, want to defile that.    
To my paranoid, embittered self, Barnabas was exceptionally dazzling.    
Preciously, I cherished him.   
Like stealing one flower from a stranger’s garden, and cultivating it where no one else can see.   
I’ve always wanted a flower of my own.    
He was mine to nurture, mine to grow, and mine to pour herbicide on and watch him rot from the roots.    
  
Blue Hydrangeas, full vivacious blooms with bright petals but with no seeds, a flower that blooms beautifully only to wilt away all the faster, and Barnabas standing in the center of them, like the whole garden as growing around him. Blue flowers, the same shade of his eyes. Jonah supposed heshould have found it beautiful, but to him it was like slits appeared in the vines, sleeping eyes waiting to awaken, and every blue flower which unfurled contained a severed eyeball at its center, and they were all watching him. They saw him more naked than anyone had ever seen him, and he was ashamed of himself.    
  
In a fit he grew tired of walking next to Barnabas and pushed him over, like they were children again tumbling among the flowers. Barnabas rolled, taking it with good humor as he always did.    
  
“What has you so upset, Jonah? Let me guess, everything.” 

Barnabas was sensitive to other people’s emotions, but not quite smart enough to figure out the cause of those emotions. There were quite a few times Jonah was upset at Barnabas for some small misunderstanding of him, before he accepted he didn’t want to be understood at all.    


“You, primarily.”    
  
“Why is that?”    
  
“I want to lock myself in my room and be miserable forever, and you won’t allow that. You keep trying to cheer me up, you terrible, terrible man.” 

“Oh, I’m just awful aren’t I? Happiness is an incurable sickness.”    
  
He threw himself into the flowers next to Barnabas. Barnabas rolled over on top of him, and settled. He placed one hand on Jonah’s chest, and curled the other around his back. Jonah at first went rigid as he liked being touched about as much as he liked being looked at (though he did enjoy touching other people when he wanted it) but then he placed a hand against the back of Barnabas to support him and his fingers relaxed into the gentle curve of Bennett’s spine.    
  
He raised one knee to catch Barnabas as Barnabas was sitting on his hips. As he looked up Jonah thought, his body was perfectly designed to fit mine. It was as if this was their garden of Eden, and god had plucked out one of his ribs in order to give him a companion from the dirt that would fit next to him.    
  
_ He was given to me, by god. _ _  
_ _ He’s mine.  _

His to play with, his to throw away. His to remember, his to forget.    
  
“Really, what on earth are you doing, worrying about me.”    
  
“Rather than being worried I’m… I really don’t know…” Barnabas said, and then a very human emotion took over his face revealing that he was not the perfectly innocent angelic creature he appeared to be. “Was it something Mordechai did to you?”   
  
“Mordechai has been a good friend to me.”   
  
“As good of a friend as I am?”    
  
“Everyone on earth is a friend to me. I am rather christ-like in my love of the entire human race.”   
  
“That’s just your way of saying you don’t particularly like anyone. I know you, Jonah.”    
  
“I suppose you do.” Jonah shrugged, utter nonchalance. “As much as anybody can claim to know anybody.”    
  
“Do you love him?”   
  
His forehead was sweating and his voice cracked like he was an adolescent.   
You always ask such stupid questions, Barnabas.    
It’s why even if Jonah wanted to bring you along the eye would never choose you.    
  


“You’re scared, aren’t you?” Jonah said. “I’m not like you, Barnabas. I don’t think you’d understand but… I don’t have a choice. To obtain what I desire I can’t be bothered to care about appearances. I can even throw away my whole life.”    
  
“...J-jonah.”   
  
“You… have it good, huh? You always keep so far away from people you never have to see their ugly sides, and you can remain good friends with them. I am only using him, and I am only using you, and I should really stop-”   
  
“Don’t stop.” 

  
Barnabas pled.    
Long-limbed and slender as a flower stem. 

He wrapped his thin arms around Jonah like a vine.   
  
“I really am the worst human being alive, because I know how terribly unfond you are of me but I never want to let go.”  
  
“Oh, but you will.” Jonah said, almost smugly.   
  
“I won’t.”   
  
“Fine, then. I won’t let go either. I’ll keep you long after death.”  
  
“You have so many friends you’ll forget me easily. It will be the same as losing a single flower from this garden overflowing with them, nobody will know the difference.”  
  
“I will.”   
  
Jonah shook his head.   
  
“I will never have another friend after you are gone, Barnabas Bennett.”  
  
I know I’m a liar.   
But, Jonah Magnus did not lie back then.   
He closed his eyes and tried hard not to think about how one day Barnabas would be buried underneath this garden, and how his body would be cannibalized by the roots of the plants to provide nutrition for the greedy, bloodthirsty flowers.   
  
Your not-friend but close enough,   
Elias Bouchard.


	5. Letter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BODY HORROR THIS CHAPTER. It's about typical from what you'd expect in TMA Canon. Hydrangea images taken once again from osheets_ and used in the fic.

Dear Nowhere Man,    
  
Are you still reading these letters? Wow, you must like me a great deal more than your behavior towards me suggests. I on the other hand am not terribly fond of you, Peter. Unrequited love is always such a tragedy. 

Speaking of tragedies, let’s skip to my favorite part.    
The end where everyone dies.    
  


♟️  
  
  
I warned him not to cross Mordechai Lukas, and he did it anyway.   
Heaven only knows why.   
I suppose I won’t know until I invade the kingdom, and claim the throne for myself.    
I would flatter myself to think that it might have been simple jealousy over me that I had nurtured all this time, but I’m not a god who can control everybody and see everything coming, not yet at least, Barnabas made his own choices and I made mine, and I didn’t choose him.    
  
I wonder if Mordechai thought he was stealing something precious away for me. If he did he was a fool. There is nothing anyone can do to ever take what is mine, because my things are mine, even when I throw them away.    
  
It happened in a garden.    
The same garden that we walked in that day, and Barnabas once stole flowers from.    
I don’t know if his mind wandered out of the garden, the last letter he wrote told me so, but his body was left behind in one. It was lying there amongst the flowers like a marionette with all the strings cut before being carelessly tossed aside.    
  
The garden was trying to reclaim Barnabas. That was the first thing that Jonah noticed. He had been lying in the dirt so long, and so still without moving, that the flowers started to grow around him. 

Oh, it was a lovely bloom. 

Vines wrapped around his body like puppet strings, and then all the way around his neck strangling him. There was a flower in his mouth, the roots of which had probably already reached all the way down his throat, and grown into the bloody pink flesh of his esophagus. He swallowed seeds, that shot up and grew with such voraciousness that his stomach ruptured, and green vines snuck out as well as the small amounts of bile and acid mixed together that drip, drip, dripped in green liquid from the cracks. 

His eyes were gone. Perhaps, Mordechai really had stolen them like a pair of jewels. In each empty eye socket planted to fill the holes was a blue flower, the roots were probably reaching all the way behind his empty eye socket, and growing in the meat of his brain. I imagine it must have been hard to think. Roots that grew in between synapses, as hungry as any tumor.    
  
His stomach had been sliced open, and like a cornucopia his organs all spilled out. Each of his ribs had been grabbed and pulled apart. They were not broken, but bent back. Flowers had grown between them, and gradually over time forced them to separate with their mass. Vines gripped the bones and bid them to grow to their will. It was very likely his stomach had been sliced open to deliver a killing blow, and the garden had merely incorporated afterwards.    
  
There was a substance leaking from the cavern where his organs were supposed to be that looked like the sweetest nectar. Jonah wondered if it was the flowers, or the insects that had reduced his insides to what looked to be no more than crushed pulp. There were things writhing around inside of him, impatient for him to die so they could begin to chew on his dead flesh.    
  
You see, his mind had left his body.   
He wandered away from it like a ghost.   
But the body, it was still alive.   
The brain never registered the death because it was elsewhere, the shock never killed him, and therefore the brain stem continued to perform the most basic tasks of living. He was probably nurtured in some part by the garden, the same way the garden fed off of him.    
  
Jonah could see even though one lung was collapsed pierced through by a particularly thorny vine, the other lung kept expanding, and then compressing. He was still awake you see. He was feasted upon while he was still alive.    
  
Yes, the flowers devoured him.   
I said flowers were like eyelids, opening welty to reveals eyes underneath did I?    
I was wrong.   
They were lips parting, they made horrible smacking sounds to sound off their hunger.    
Blue lips and white teeth. It was like hundreds of mouths were opening at once in order to devour dear, dear Barnabas.    
  
Are you a fan of greek tragedy?   
No, of course not, you only read boring books about boats.    
The Bacchae is a tragedy based on the Greek myth of King Pentheus of Thebes, and their punishment by the god Dionysus to be torn apart and eaten alive by a maddened crowd of people. 

Now imagine that happening, but much more slowly. So slow the body did not even realize it was dying. Like a snake cut into pieces, each one of the pieces was still alive, but all it could do was squirm in pain. Each mouth bit him, and tore away chunks in them, and then chewed the human meat with an open mouth.    
  
His entire body was a garden now.    
A corpse bloom.    
Overflowing flowers from a festering corpse.    
Their was thick with the scent of rotting flowers, and in the middle of the flowerbed there was Barnabas.   
  
Strangely, I thought he was beautiful.   
I often mocked Barnabas for his messy, plain looks but for the first time I realized he was always hiding such beauty inside of him, it was deep in the pits of him, hidden somewhere in his organs, he just had to be gutted like a fish first so everything beautiful about him could be dragged to the surface.    
  
He had flowers inside of him all along, or maybe the seeds of flowers just waiting to take root.    
  
I felt a dizzying, disorienting, maddening kind of love for him in that moment, like the Eros the greeks wrote about. Then, I came to my senses and looked again at the scene before my eyes.    
  
It.   
Was not anything like flowers.   
It looked like death.   
The thing I hated the most.    
  
I picked him up because he was mine, like an innocent virgin I stole from the flowerbed she was lying in. Then I carried him all the way back to my estate. I had only the vaguest sense of time then, and where I was going, it was sheer luck I ended up back at home.    
  
I… I…   
He, Jonah.   
Jonah Magnus.    
Jonah Magnus he simply watched. He could have done something, he could have called on Mordechai and interfered on the behalf of his friend, but if he wanted to do that he would have done that a month ago before the body had fallen to this state of destitution and ruin.    
  
He brought it to a bed in his home, and slowly watched the body starve to death. He wanted to see it wilt. He wondered in the most scientific sense what it would be like to simply wait and let the body rot over time, and what would become of it.    
  
He learned a lesson then.   
Everything, everything, everything decays.    
He didn’t know the precise point at which the human soul leaves the body, and it is no longer a shape or form that can be recognized as human and simply becomes a lump of meat but he was eager to find out. 

In his letter Barnabas claimed he could hear the mocking joy of his friends.   
Jonah wondered if Barnabas heard his laughter.    
There was never any recognition in Barnabas’ eyes he simply stared forward with a milky expression uncomprehending (his eyes had never truly been torn out, but pushed aside by the flowers that grew out of his skull, Jonah simply plucked the flowers out and put the eyeballs still connected to the optic nerve but dangling like they were on a string back in the skull), until right before the very end when a single spark remained. After wandering lost all that time, did he return to his body? Jonah had been waiting, and watching, for any sign of his old friend in the withered and decaying flower his left behind body was.    
  
He blinked, and a tear fell out of them.    
  
“I won’t have another friend after you.”    
There was a hint of sadness somewhere in Jonah’s murmuring voice.   
“You were the most important to me of all…”    
  
Those were his true feelings. As especially important existence, the only person who knew what he looked like in childhood, and the only person who his true self reflected in their eyes, no matter what ever since they were boys, he always continued to follow him, always continued to unconditionally love him, and above all, just being by his side was like sunlight to a flower starved for the smallest amount of light or warmth all these years.    
  
Jonah simply watched that flower wither away in front of him. He trampled on it, ripped it out of the roots, and then brutally murdered it. Their lives were so interconnected they were like flowers that had been planted too close together, and grown with roots intermingling, to the point where it was impossible to tell where one of them began and the other ended, and like their nervous systems were mixed up he felt Barnabas’ pain like his own pain, and hurting Barnabas was merely an act of self flagellation. Trying to tear himself away from Barnabas would be as painful as tearing his own flesh from his body, and trying to live without him like trying to live with half of his flesh gone and the raw, red muscles, tendons all exposed underneath.    
  
“I…”    
  


He loved him so much, that irreplaceable existence, more important than anyone else, more me than myself, always wanting to be in his embrace, even giving up on his ambitions, even giving up on the world and running away to the dimension of the Lonely to be alone together with only him would be fine.    
  
Losing that person would be worse than suicide.   
Jonah felt himself, over half of himself die. 

But, that’s exactly what he wanted. He planed a seed of love in his heart, and nurtured it all this time so he could rip out that same heart, and see if somehow he would be able to continue living after that point, and in slowly watching Barnabas waste away in front of him Jonah had performed a test to confirm exactly what kind of man he was.    
  
He…   
He…   
I…   
  
“I am a bad man. You should have known better to love me.”    
  
I only wanted Barnabas, and now that I would never have him nothing would satisfy me, not even the whole world, so I smiled, and I laughed. I hadn’t yet developed the ability to steal away people’s eyes, but I would have given anything in that moment to peel open Barnabas’ eyes so he could see that in his last moments I was standing over him watching him. A single tear ran down his eye, and they fell shut for the last time.    
  
What was he thinking of at that time?   
Did he think of me?    
I laughed. Barnabas was always so good at making me laugh. Every single happy memory I have was tied up to him, and now, they were all gone. And I was glad for it.    
  


♟️

Do you see now why I tell you this story?    
  
You are wasting away, and one day you will be bones in my office. That is the natural end point of this relationship. You know that dream you have of dying alone? I would never let you have that. I would ruin your last small moment of happiness just so I could watch.    
  
Is that why you run away from me?   
Because you, as well as I, know that any fraternization between us is doomed?    
No, it’s not that, is it? 

No, that would make too much sense. You like to throw tantrums for much pettier reasons.    
  
You’re still not over what happened in Disney Land last year, are you?    
  
Your unloyal, not-friend,    
Elias Bouchard. 


	6. Letter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> MORE BODY HORROR. Themes of transformation, Jonah being uncomfortable / dissatisfied with your body. Honestly I find the urge to become some horrible monster to be very relatable because human bodies suck. OH and Gore, there's gore this chapter. And a corpse.

My Dear Nowhere Man,    
  
You are the only person who I have ever told this tale to. Does that make you feel special? That was a joke of course, I’ll tell this story to anyone who will listen. Simon Fairchild has heard it three times at least.    
  
You know how much I love talking about myself.    
  
What?    
You say I talk about myself a little bit too much?   
  
It’s called having a personality, Peter. I’m not a bunch of fog in an overcoat like you. In fact you could stand to practice a little more self love, it’s hard to be alone with yourself when you hate yourself. Not that I find there to be anything particularly lovable about you.    
  
Yes, I know. You’re not actually here talking with me as I write this letter. I can’t predict the future either, I’m merely making a guess at what you might say in response to reading this. Which means yes, I am sitting at my desk here pretending that you are next to me having a conversation with me because as you’ve said before I am the most desperate man on earth. 

I know what you’re going to say next. You never loved Barnabas, you only loved yourself. What a novel accusation. Are you one of the good guys now? Have you been eating your chicken soup for the soul, Peter? Since when have you become such an expert on healthy relationships?

Of course I love myself. I just have so many wonderful qualities. But, I loved him just as much, maybe even more. I didn’t know you were such a romantic, Peter. Did you think love was something tender, sweet and affectionate? Loving someone feels like some sort of violence tearing you into pieces.    
  
I watched him die, because it was the closest thing I could possibly think of to suicide. Even now I am half dead without him, and yet still somehow living. Whether it be anger, or sadness, all negative emotions will fade away with time and distance, but I’ve kept his body closer to me than anyone else. I’ve never let the memory of him fade away. I’ve developed wounds that will never heal.   
  
You know how much I love to pick at scabs, other people’s, and my own. You say it’s my most annoying habit, I pick, and I pick, and I pick, and I pick, and I’ll never feel whole again and that was the point. I need a hole in my heart that can never be filled. I needed to become somebody who wouldn’t be satisfied even if they held the whole world in my hands.    
  
I’m not even human, you say?    
  


Of course I am. I know we pretend to be comic book villains, but you and I are just as human as everyone else. No, maybe we’re lacking in something vital. I failed to do what most normal people can, I couldn’t ever be the son of Jonah Magnus Sr. That’s our fate, no matter how hard we try we can’t do what everyone else does, thus failing at that we aspire to greater things. We can never be human so we try to be more than human.    
  
Enough pop psychology and psychoanalysis, let’s get to the good part. The part where I talk about myself some more.    
  
♟️

Jonah put his letter opening knife down. He had just finished reading the letter from Lukas estate. He had written immediately after Barnabas passed demanding recompense for the death of his closest friend. Mordechai Lukas promised to become one of the major supporters of his foundation, and the matter was settled.    
  
He brought the letter to the candle, and watched it burn up, destroying the last possible evidence that Barnabas had been murdered. There was talk that he had taken another impromptu expedition to Egypt, but honestly Barnabas was not someone anyone would miss enough to inquire after.    
  
He was sitting in the desk of his room, and Barnabas lay there in his bed undisturbed. Jonah hadn’t moved the body yet. When it had started to smell he ordered a servant to cover it in flowers to mask the scent of rotting flesh.    
  
He was going to bury it sooner or later, but first he wanted to see if his experiment worked. Or if he got Barnabas into horse racing, lent him a great deal of money, introduced him to Mordechai Lukas, then warned him not to cross Mordechai Lukas (the easiest way to get someone to do something is to tell them not to do it, because all grown men are children) for nothing.    
  
You see transformation requires a sacrifice. Jonah was willing to cut up the organs of anything, and let it bleed innocent lamb blood on the altar, lets it flesh burn and entice the gods ith the scent of roasted meat, he would give them anything except for himself, never himself.    
  
He picked the next best thing, he killed himself symbolically, and the gods sure do love symbolism. Days had past and nothing, just a corpse buried in flowers. Jonah walked up to Barnabas, no emotion but curiosity stirred him. He placed his fingers on the eyes that he closed to preserve some dignity of the corpse, and then with his thumb and forefinger peeled them open once more.   
  
Oh, how he longed to know what Barnabas had seen in his last moments. 

  
  


Even in death Barnabas’ eyes were a perfect blue. He was driven by a sudden fit of mania, the product of not sleeping for days after the fact (how could he, Barnabas was in his bed and he didn’t want to disturb his rest) he sunk his two fingers in the corners of his left eye curled them like the talons of a greedy owl and snatched the precious blue orb away. He pulled all the way until the optic nerve fell out, and then pulled harder watching the nerve slowly tear apart from the tension.    
  
He clumsily stumbled back to is desk, holding the eyeball close to his chest like it was a pearl he had snatched away. His owl eyed glasses, he reached towards them with trembling fingers. The truth was he didn’t need to wear glasses. He liked having a barrier between his face and others. He wanted a thin sheet of glass to hide behind. His clumsy fingers struggled to take them off and they fell on the floor, and the lenses cracked. Jonah hardly cared at the moment.    
  
He looked at the glassy eyeball as if contemplating what to do with it. Then, he picked up the letter opener he had carelessly tossed aside. He turned it towards himself, and jammed it underneath his eye. His eyelids opened wetly, and made the ugliest smacking sound he could possibly imagine, his eye welled up with what might have been tears (finally able to cry over him, huh you heartless, heartless man) and then turned red with blood. He dug around in his eye socket, a clumsy oaf who had no idea what he was doing, before he thought to look in a mirror rather than attempt this task blindly. He turned the letter opener to make a scooping motion but in reverse, and then much more easily than he ever thought it would, as soft and smooth as butter his eye opened out of the socket. Letter openers are not meant to cut human flesh, so he had to struggle a moment to cut the cord of his optic nerve, it felt a little bit like trying to cut through wet taffy.    
  
Then a pop, then a snap, he moved a finger towards his empty eye socket and stuck his fat finger right in his own hole to explore and feel how hollow it was. When he was satisfied he popped in Barnabas’ eyeball and it was a perfect fit.    
  
Something overcame him. He was forced to see an image.    
  
I’ve never explained to you what my power is like, have I? Imagine waking up in a room where all the walls consist of nothing but television screens and monitors all piled up on top of one another. They are all, at every moment, flipping channels so fast and never lingering on the same feedback for more than a moment. Nobody would ever be able to make sense of it, but if I focus enough, just for a moment I can understand it. Even then it’s like the image is being written directly onto my brain, burned onto my retinas with soldering irons.    
  
And you’re tied to the chair with manacles. And your eyelids are pulled back and kept by a metal brace an optometrist would use to keep them open like this is bloody clockwork orange. If only I could hear classical music that would be a welcome relief from the noise of other people’s thoughts. Even if you wanted to, even if you were crying and screaming in insanity, your eyes would remain open and you would be forced to look. 

Not that I would ever want to look away, mind you. 

  
The image came over Jonah all at once and it took him a moment to realize this was his own memory from a different perspective. 

There was a boy alone in the garden.   
A pair of hands. 

His hands were bruised, but not because he had been playing in the dirt.    
It was an impossible, chance meeting to begin with.    
This was, his very first experience, his very first word he had ever heard.   
His root memory.    
A past both easy to recall and easy to metaphorically describe.    
The first moment Jonah Magnus thought, I am me.    
  
A boy had found him all alone in the flowers. Rudely, he stared, and Jonah hated staring. There were curls that fell in front of the eyes he was watching from, because even back then the boy’s hair was a mess. Barnabas Bennett had picked one of the blue flowers as a curiosity and let it fall from his fingers when he noticed the little boy hiding all alone.    
  
“What are you doing?”    
  


“...”   
  
“Can you speak?” 

“It's hard...   
  
“Why?"   
  
“It's hard to breathe... and my voice sounds so small."   
  
“Oh? Why not?”   
  
“It doesn’t sound important enough. I have to be someone important when I grow up, or father will dislike me terribly. I'm... I'm the only one that lived, so I gotta.”    
  
“Are you scared?”   
  
“Father doesn’t like it when I speak either. I must sound childish to you, begging for my father’s attention like this, s’not m’ture at all. That’s the kind of person I hate the most, the kind that’s just like e’rybody else. I'm going to die, I'm going to die no one important.”   
  
Talking that much made little Jonah break into another fit of coughs. 

The boy was rambling. The pair of eyes he was watching not comprehending looked down, then up, and focused on those tiny hands. He picked up the flower he had dropped, and placed it in young Jonah’s fingers. He just thought those delicate hands deserved to be regarded with softness and care. He placed the flower in between Jonah’s fingers, and slowly curled the other boys fingers around it so he would not let go.    
  
“Well, I like people like that.”   
  
"Nobody will even cry."  
  
"No way, I'll cry. I cry all the time over every little thing."  
  
Suddenly, there was one person who Jonah did not have to show off and be special in front of. The beginning was, just like that. It was quiet, and undramatic and didn’t suit him at all, and neither did Barnabas and people constantly questioned their relationship. Barnabas did too.    
  
Images flashed by. He held onto his mother’s skirt, and Barnabas held onto his mother’s hand, and he slowly reached out and intertwined Barnabas’ fingers with his. They were older, and Barnabas dragged him forward into the garden, and they were both laughing, and Barnabas tackled him and he fell and tumbled. The world spun and it was nothing but flowers, a kaleidoscope of blue, and then the flower petals that were kicked up, and blown about in a sudden storm by the wind settled.   
  
As an adult and witness to his own memories Jonah simply sat back on the porch watching. He leaned all the way back and looked up at the sky until the sun became blinding to him. You might have even caught him smiling out of fondness for the man he had just watched die without lifting a single finger.   
  
Barnabas and him were laying down next to each other on perfectly white sheets, their fingers still intertwined. Not once had he let go of that hand in all of these memories ever since it was first offered to him. They were like two caterpillars who somehow, happened to to crawl into the same chrysalis.    
  
Then, lingering on the image of those two hands he heard two voices speaking up.    
  
“You must find me a terrible bore, Jonah.”    
  
“Of course I do, but I’m a philanthropist so I’ll put up with you anyway.”    
  
“I don’t know what you see in me.”    
  
“I see everything.”    
  
“You think you sound so smart when you’re vague like that. You are so convinced that you’re charming.”   
  
“Others find me charming. Shall I list the names? All the men I cavort with to make you jealous?”   
  
“You know most people would not brag to the face of their friend and dearest companion about that sort of thing. You have such a wandering eye, I don’t know what you want… and you… you’re so, so vague, Jonah. I never know where you are.”    
  
“I am here.”

“No you’re not. Not with me in this moment. You’re not experiencing this exact same second with me, and feeling what I feel, and looking what I look at, and you lie next to me but you don’t even leave an impression on the mattress. And it is all so terribly lonely, Jonah.”    
  
“Hm.”   
  
“And now you play at being disinterested so I will beg for your attention. I do not know why you make me jump through these hoops like a trained circus animal. Jonah, I’d do anything for you.”   
  
“I know that.”   
  
“Because I… I can’t live without you anymore.”    
  
“Would you die for me then?”    
  
“I…” 

He never heard the answer. Suddenly, he was thrown out of his vision. It was like waking from a dream by having his head dunked under cold water and all of his oxygen cut off. He was suddenly drowning, and suddenly, just as suddenly he began to transform.    
  
Let’s continue this later,   
Your omniscient and ever-present god,    
Elias Bouchard. 


	7. Letter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Themes of body horror, themes of transformation, uncomfortable feelings of discomfort with his own body, birth imagery, you know classical horror fair.

Dear Nowhere Man,    
  
There’s a question that bugs me to this day, Peter. Was I perhaps, trying to be normal? Trying to observe and imitate a normal person? Trying to get a taste of the cup everybody else drank from when I knew I was better than that? Destined for more than that? 

You’re not so great, you say.   
Please come up with better retorts Peter, you’re embarrassing the both of us.    
  
♟️

He never felt like he was good enough. Not for his parents, he could hardly care less of the opinion of two such boring, law-abiding citizens. He was never good enough for himself. The Jonah Magnus he saw in the mirror fell so short of who he imagined himself as.    
  
It’s hard to describe what comes next.   
It was the moment I was born within Jonah Magnus.    
Maybe it was the moment I became Jonah Magnus?    
I became me, Jonah Magnus felt like me… more or less.   
Identity is such a confusing thing you know it’s not as solid as you think it’s always in a state of flux, unless you’re nobody interesting like my dear Peter.    
  
(Don’t get all sulky, I only mean to tease not to hurt your feelings.)   
(Oh wait, I definitely, definitely mean to hurt your feelings.)   
  
It was a bit like giving birth, or maybe being pregnant with himself? Jonah felt a terrible pain in his stomach, and he stumbled back clutching himself. He reached out for something to grab onto, and dragged the curtains down with him.    
  
He felt like he was dying, and to him that was the worst possible feeling? Does a fetus imagine it’s dying when it sees the light outside the womb for the first time? Imagine seeing something you’ve never seen before and being completely unable to recognize the image because your brain is not developed enough to process it, so all you feel is the only real fear that we all share the feel of the unknown. Something like that, yes. Like being born. Except the fetus had to hit its tiny fingers against the wall, and with its undeveloped hands cut open both the tissue of the womb, and the flesh of its mothers stomach, and then pull itself through the organs, squish, squish, squish.    
  
He finally lost his grip on reality, and all he knew that his hands were trying to climb, climb out of the womb. He grabbed onto the intestines of his mother, they felt like and made the sound of selt noodles. It was a disgusting, yet strangely satisyingly wet sound, and the sound dripped as he tugged himself forward. The intestines were nodded together like rope, and he pulled on the rope.    
  
It was like something inside of him was slowly growing larger, and larger, and stretching his skin to its absolute limit. In this metaphor he was both the mother, and the child being born, and he heard the sound of tendons breaking like they were violin strings breaking and with their last plucking playing the most ugly, discordant note possible like a dying scream. His skin stretched to the point of tearing, he felt his muscles begin to rip at the sinews. A mother giving birth feels love for their child to counteract the pain, and Jonah finally began to feel something that he thought might have been loving himself.    
  
He was returned to reality. No, maybe it was better to say he was dragged their, in screaming pain, the exact sensation was hooks driven under his flesh, and pulling, pulling him. He got up and noticed in his madness, like he thought they were on fire he had torn at his clothes and they were now in tatters.   
  
If this was the only way he could be born he wondered what made him. Was he a parasite that hid within Jonah Magnus all along? Did he suck on the blood of Jonah Magnus to nourish himself, only to be born from his corpse? Perhaps he was like the cordyceps, a fungus that slowly grew in the wet and mouldy brain, and took over convincing Jonah that he wanted these things, he wanted to sacrifice his body to a god so the fungus deep within him could complete his life cycle.

He inspected his arms and legs and saw long stretch marks on his skin. So the pain had not been a delusion. Suddenly, the stretch marks stretched further, and turned into long slits. Each of the slits slowly began to peel open.    
  
Did a caterpillar feel its wings pushing against the flesh of its back when it was in its larval state? Jonah wondered idly, his mind was idle, because he was on the brink of madness staring off the edge of a cliff. The flesh on his back stretched and he remarked  _ how wonderful, my wings are growing in  _ or something like that. Perhaps he didn’t say anything. Perhaps he just screamed out in pain. His body was the chrysalis. He was the broken shell that would be left behind after the transformation was complete.    
  
Jonah had holes inside of him. He had always known they were there. Those holes were finally becoming visible to everyone else. His flesh torn itself apart, they were like lips parting and mouths opening up all over him. For a second he feared he might be devoured just as he let the flowers devour Barnabas. Yes, he was, his whole body was a garden, and he had planted the seeds himself a long time ago for this festering, parasitic, bloom.    
  
His skin pulled apart and he felt it rip and tear, a thousand cuts opening all over his body. This was the feeling the caterpillar felt when it sits in the chrysalis, and its organs are melted into a juice, a smoothie of dead flesh, and cellular material, that is not aware and yet somehow still alive. This is what a caterpillar felt and yet he was actively awake to see himself change. He had to see, had to watch his growth, he could not look away from the pain or anything else for a single moment.    
  
There was holes in his brain too. He could feel it in his brain. The space separating. It felt like worms crawling around, digging holes, and chewing on his nervous system. There were holes, holes, holes in his brain and then those holes opened and they became eyes. He saw on his open palm the slitlike eyelids part, and then an eyeball slowly roll, its pupil circling around until it steadied and focused on him.    


Elias screamed and fell back. He fell into the bed where Barnabas still lay, and finally he felt like he was at peace. He felt like he could rest again. Elias reached out and touched the half rotted face of his friend leaving a thin-mucus like film where his fingers had been touching and muttered.    
  
“Let’s rest a little bit, Barnabas.”    
  
Then all the eyes open on his body closed.    
All he could see was darkness and he liked that.    
  
He woke up.   
For the faintest moment he thought this was a normal day, Barnabas was sleeping next to him, and made the most ridiculously unguarded face when he was sleeping like a carefree cat who never expected anyone to hurt him. He smiled to himself. If Barnabas ever saw such an obvious proof of his affection he would be insufferable, Jonah knew.   
  
Then Barnabas was still.   
He reached out and shook his friend. Barnabas’ skin was cold, and where his blue eye should have been was an empty hole, a darkness that seemed to be gnawing away at the rest of Barnabas’ face leaving it half eaten.    
  
He remembered all at once. He had woken up next to a corpse. Barnabas died, he watched, and now he would never see Barnabas again. He stumbled out of the bed, and stepped on the glasses he had left on the floor completely by accident, completely crushing them underneath his foot. 

In the mirror Jonah Magnus stood and he almost looked normal. Then, the eyes opened all over his flesh. They were like a thousand parasites in his skin bulging out of the upper layer of his epidermis, twitching and writhing. He was an unbelievably sick leper with a thousand open lesions on his body, his flesh peeling back.

A thousand eyes opened.   
He saw himself reflecting in the mirror from a thousand different angles. It was like staring at the world through the compound, fractured eyes of an insect, all those thousands of images somehow bled together and began one in his mind. Everything was sharp to look at, everything hurt to stare at, his eyes were… unbelievably sore, and he just wanted to close them again and sleep forever but he couldn’t.    
  
He saw himself in the mirror, and placed his hands on the glass so he could touch and make contact with the boy looking back from the other side of the glass.   
  
He saw, and looked, and thought for the first time in his life.   
_ I am wonderful.  _   
  
I really am wonderful, aren’t I?    
Your dear frenemy,    
Elias Bouchard


	8. Letter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS THE LAST OF THE BODY HORROR CHAPTERS. Feelings of paranoia, transformation, ummm... body jacking hijinks? It goes back to fluff after this I promise.

**Elias Bouchard**

♟️  
  


My dear Nowhere Man,    
  
Well that’s enough about Jonah Magnus’ story. Oh, what is this? You’re curious? About me? I never knew you cared. I bet you’re wondering why I don’t call it ‘my story?’ 

Certainly, I was called Jonah Magnus once. That was what everyone around me called me, and the man that everyone’s eyes saw. However, Jonah Magnus is not me. I am not him. The man writing you today, the man you know is Elias Bouchard. You have only known me as Elias Bouchard, and that is the only name you call me long after finding out I was once Jonah Magnus.    
  
I am not simply Jonah Magnus pretending to be Elias Bouchard, I am not crammed into an Elias Bouchard meat suit like three children standing on each other’s shoulders wearing an overcoat and pretending to be an adult. Jonah Magnus, suave, sophisticated, worldly, always surrounded by other people, the talk of the crowds was Jonah Magnus. Elias Bouchard, unknown, a recluse, spends all of his time in his office spying on his employees because he has no true friends, laid back, a passive watcher is Elias Bouchard.    
  
How can I explain this to a total dullard like yourself, Peter? Oh, do you remember what I said before that Barnabas Bennett was the only one who could know and understand the real me? I might have been wrong.    
  
Oh, stop laughing. Even God is wrong sometimes. Have you ever read the old testament?    
  
I digress. 

Allow me to make an allusion to a book you’ve never read because you have no taste in literature, Peter. I was like Dorian Gray. Yes, yes, we get it Elias you were gay and dramatic in the 1800s and now you’re referencing Oscard Wilde. I know I’m not an original, everyone was gay and dramatic back then there was nothing else to do.    
  
I thought if there were a portrait of my soul that had shown how rotten and corrupt I became, and I showed it to Barnabas he would love me all the same. Perhaps that was what I wanted love to be, someone who would understand and love your most monstrous, ugly side. As a man I was loved, as a monster I am alone. It’s what I deserve I suppose, but I’ll still complain about it. I thought, Barnabas would continue unfailingly to love me but… perhaps the emotion I glimpsed in his eyes just before he passed away was fear.    
  
Perhaps Barnabas, my one and only friend, never once saw the true me and when he caught a glimpse of who I was and he hated what he saw. Well… ever since then, I’ve considered “me” to be an ambiguous word. 

♟️

He smelled like tea leaves, and marijuana cigarettes.    
  
Elias Bouchard had promised himself today he would take his job more seriously, and stop getting high on his breaks but by lunch he was already reneging on his promise. He stared at the end of his cigarette as it burned up and decayed away into ash, and sighed, smoke coming out of his nose and mouth.    
  
He thought he’d quit once he got out of college, but there was something about this building that always set his nerves on fire. Perhaps he wasn’t doing this for the high, but rather the chance to inhale smoke, taste something that was on fire. His mother would nag him if he was caught smoking tobacco instead.   
  
Who was Elias Bouchard?   
No one important, really. You might say I have a type.I like to give my love to people who would be nothing without me. Barnabas Bennett would have been just another lonely gent. Sasha unappreciated in her field, Martin all alone with his mother, Tim unable to hold down a normal job still hurting about his brother, you could say I’m helping them. I know they can be better than who they are. For instance, Elias Bouchard could be so much better, he could become me.    
  
In an old stone tower buried far beneat the earth, the crumpled up and discarded of an old man who was once called Jonah, opened his eyes and saw Elias Bouchard. He had wavy hair that looked like it had gone unwashed for a few days, there was an acne break out on his cheeks, and he was untidy and unshaven.    
  
Elias felt a sensation like a small pin pricking him in the back of the neck. He was being watched. He quickly turned his head around thinking the boss must have caught him. There was no one there. He should have sighed in relief, but for some reason he felt the no one there, the nobody was what was watching him.    
  
“Errr, did I get a bad trip? Ugh, this is why you should never buy from your friends.” 

Elais didn’t have any friends. He pretended his dealer was a friend however, a friend he only communicated with on a regular basis because he was paying him, and pretended the reason they made small talk when they met up was because they actually liked each other.    
  
Who was Elias Bouchard?   
He was the kind of person who would be overly nice to a cashier, and not understand they wanted him to move the line along already.    
  
He heard a noise. He started, and his fingers loosened slightly causing the cigarette to fall out. When he bent over to pick it up he was convinced he saw something. Eyes, watching him from the shadows. Elias walked over and saw nothing there, and once again the lack of a person, the unknown was somehow scarier. 

He tried to take another puff and forget to take his mind off things (wherever his mind was, right now) and suddenly he started to cough. He hacked, like he was dying, and was trying to vomit out his own lungs. His whole body thrashed, and he tasted awful and finally he bent over and spit it out.    
  
He looked at the table to see a single eyeball staring back at him.    
  
“This really is a bad trip. Goddamnit, since when have I been this creative?”    
  
He yelled at no one in particular. The eye watched him. Elias was suddenly struck by the feeling that there were eyes elsewhere, all watching him, he just could not see them. The break room was dark and completely isolated. Elias thought he was fine with the darkness, until the darkness moved and started to breathe.    
  
As if all of the empty space in the room was alive. There was nothing, nobody was there, no one… He was all alone in this room. He repeated it to himself again and again. He got out of his chair and took a step, and what he thought was a shadow on the floor suddenly had depth, and was wet like water. He came to touch it, and it spasmed and twitched.    
  
He had always gotten an off feeling about this building. He started to feel as if he was not in a room, he was in the organ of some massive creature much bigger than him. A single room was like a chamber in the heart, or a kidney, or part of a lung. It was made of tissue, and wet with life, and he was on the inside because it swallowed him up.    
  
Yes, something, something, wanted to eat him. He went to the doorknob and then quickly withdrew his hand, because it felt rough, and sticky like someone’s tongue. The thing that wanted to eat him was larger than him. The thing that was going to eat him was merely playing with its food. He was surrounded on all sides, and he was being watched.    
  
Suddenly, slits appeared in the shadows. He heard the sound of smacking lips. All around him, eyes slowly peeled open, they spun around and all came to focus on him. He was being watched by several pairs of eyes, and when he saw himself reflected in those eyes thousands of times he thought he looked so, so, very small.    
  
Then, nothing.    
He was standing in a normal room. It was like the monster had given him up and spit him out. No, that wasn’t it, Elias realized with increasing trepidation. The monster was never outside, it was inside. 

It began from a single cell. That cell began to divide rapidly. It was like a cancer growing inside of him. Cancer is harmful because it’s just the body’s cells, growing so fast they outpace and consume the normal cells. It was like a cancer growing from within him, the new cells would replace the old. He could already feel it in the center of his brain, wrapping its fingers tight around his neuron cells.    


Have you ever heard of the kitsune? It’s an old japanese folklore, they would crawl inside of people from underneath their fingernails, and then literally wear their body from inside the skin. It was sort of like that, through the smallest crack something had entered his body. It had crawled underneath his fingernails, and crammed itself somewhere in his insides, between his ribcage and his lungs, and now he was slowly being pushed out of his own body. He could barely think, because the cancerous cells in his brain were quickly beginning to outnumber his own neurons. 

There were someone else’s thoughts in his head and they were far, far louder than his own. They spoke in such a convincing voice, he was lulled to believe that it was his own voice. He heard a second heart beat in his chest, completely out of tune with his own, and beating faster. As it beat faster, he could hear his own heart slowing down, as if the blood were slowly being drained from it. It was an impossible feeling to describe, like some know was being untied in him. Someone reached into his body, and slowly pulled out of his veins from underneath his skin, and pulled and pulled and peeled them back. Then, they did the same with the bundle of neurons in his brain, and with their clammy, wet, fingers, untied them like they were christmas lights. He suddenly heard the sound of laughter. It took him a moment to recognize. It was his own voice laughing back at him.   
  
The slime underneath his skin was sentient. It wreathed inside of him, and tried to sink deeper, deeper. It spread oozed through all the cracks in his being, penetrating him. It bore a hole in him and he felt himself leaking out. He didn't know what 'himself' consisted of. Brain goop? Thoughts? Teelings? They all seemed to drain away from him so slowly, and he had the world's worst sinking feeling, except what he was sinking inside of and drowning in was his own body which he thought was meant to comfortably contain him. He wondered how anybody could live feeling so revolted by their own skin, like they didn't belong, like someone, something was pushing them out of it. He could hardly breathe. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think.   
  
There was something writhing around in his skin, pushing his organs around, and soon it would wear his skin, and move his body for him, and become him. He would be completely paralyzed except for his eyes and all he could do was simply watch as someone else lived his life for him. 

Have you ever read the Doppelganger?

The true horror of that novel is what would you do if someone was better at being you then you ever could be? Elias Bouchard slowly realized that if he were to disappear from his own body not a single person would realize the change, not even his own mother, because he had truly grown close to nobody in his life. Not only that, he did not think he would miss anyone else. 

His muscles were locked and his body refused to obey his brain’s commands. He had such an awful headache, like two brains were crammed into the same skull. They were put in a blender, cut apart into pink chunks and brain ooze, and then forced to mix, mix, mix together. He felt himself melting, and yet, he felt even if he let himself completely dissolve he would still be conscious afterwards as a puddle. 

Who was he?   
He was bones that hurt, muscles that could not move, a brain that he could feel had pieces missing now. There were holes, holes inside his memories, they were like sun spots that appeared on exposed film, the spots grew larger, and larger in the place where people’s faces should be and he suddenly could not recall the details of his own face too well either. 

Move. Move. Move. He forced himself to move even though his muscles were screaming. He made it to the bathroom, only for his legs to give out like the strings had been cut. The puppet crashed forward and bashed his head against the corner sink. He went to feel for blood and there was none. He wanted to feel pain but there wasn’t any. Like he wasn’t a real person. Like he wasn’t really Elias Bouchard. 

He wrapped his arms around the porcelain of the sink and slowly pulled himself up.   
He looked in the mirror.    
He expected to see some horrifying monster looking back, a thousand eyes watching him from the shadows.   
He saw something far, far, worse.   
Elias Bouchard. Messy hair, pimply face, stubble on his chin.    
He saw himself completely unchanged. 

He saw nothing.   
He screamed at no one.    
  
Elias Bouchard tore the mirror off the wall and broke it across the ground. He drove his fist again and again into the glass but it was no good. The more times the mirror broke apart into pieces, he just saw more and more Eliases looking back at him. His knuckles were raw, and red, and he saw a thousand Eliases looking back at him. He stared at the mirror that reflected, and reflected, and reflected, and reflected, and reflected, and reflected, and knew he would be here forever staring into infinity and having infinity stare back inside of him.    
  
I didn’t see the warped picture of Dorian Grey that revealed his true character at that moment, I simply saw myself.    
  
Elias Bouchard simply gave up and stop moving his body. I didn’t steal it from him, I didn’t replace him. He is here, and he is watching like a good little boy, and he decided rather wisely that he was better off being me.   
  
I straightened up my slouch as I observed myself in the mirror. I cleared my throat and spoke with my own voice, exhaling the last bit of smoke that was in my lungs.    
  
“Elias Bouchard, a lovely name. I quite like it." 

I’m only trying to become the best version of myself, Peter.   
Meanwhile you remain the worst.    
  
Yours forever and always,    
Elias Bouchard   
  
  



	9. Letter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything else from here is just old men flirting.

Dear Nowhere Man,

No, I’m not going to talk about Disney Land. We are not talking about Disney Land. These letters are not about Disney Land. For one I rather dislike the company, I don’t want any competitors in my quest to rule the world. For two we don’t talk about things, that’s our entire thing, not talking, nothing would make me happier than never having to talk to you again for the rest of my life. (Why won’t you write me back already? I know you’re reading these letters.)

So, let’s continue not talking about our problems. It’s what we’re both best at. I suppose this is around the time you bumbled into my story. You always had a knack for showing up where you weren’t wanted.

♟️

Not to suddenly get all moony on you but perhaps, I’ve always wanted someone to love me as I am. Even god wanted love. See old testament again. There are plenty of stories where a beast is turned back into a man with the power of love, but what about a beast that remains a beast and is still loved anyway?

Peter Lukas hated parties, and that was why he was currently attending one. There was no feeling lonelier than being stuck at a place you didn’t even want to be at, where you knew nobody. He was addicted to that feeling the same reason why most smokers smoke even knowing that it’s bad for them, it’s the feeling of harming yourself in small amounts because then you feel completely in control of that harm.

Jonah Magnus always stood at the center of parties, all eyes on him. Everyone was watching, and nobody saw him, and he felt like he could do anything and no matter what he would be forgiven, he would be loved.

I was skulking at the edge of the party. I had only shown up ‘for the sake of appearances’. Parties used to be something Jonah Magnus enjoyed, but now they were a mere obligation. I do a lot of things for the sake of appearances nowadays, I pretend to be a friendly and affable boss, I pretend to be scheming behind the scenes.

I always feel like I’m showing up.  
But I’m not there.

Perhaps, I have gotten progressively less charming with age. Perhaps I need to steal a handsomer body next time. I had transformed myself, slicked back hair with grey streaks to give a salt and pepper look, a trim mustache that was stylish half a century ago, a black suit hemmed with gold and heels to make me slightly taller.

I was just a little bit tipsy, and I began to think this party was unworthy of my presence.

A voice rasped from behind me.  
It sounded like smoke. An utterly forgettable voice that could belong to anyone. “You shouldn’t do that, it’s bad for your health. Plus, I think I saw a no smoking sign somewhere around here. I hate to be a nag, but you know…”

Peter Lukas stood there trying to look timid in spite of his massive size. He was pulling the sea captain hat he always wore underneath his eyes, as if to hide them. He took about three sentences to say what would have taken one. He seemed to like the sound of his own voice. He had a look about him that he hated talking to others and loved talking to himself.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m planning on living a long time.”

“Well, you know what they say about plans. The best laid plans of mice and men. I mean, you know, the book with the two guys who want to buy a rabbit farm, and it’s sad because the big guy gets shot in the head at the end. And I think it’s a metaphor for socialism? It’s an American book so… maybe you haven’t read it.”

“Were you planning on saying something?”

“Well yeah, I was, but you know what they say about plans-”

“Please stop. I’m begging you.”

“You don’t look like the type that would ever beg anybody, sir.”

“And you don’t look like anything at all, sir,” I said, and then blew smoke in his face because it was the quickest way I could possibly think of to tell this person to go away. It did not work. In fact the fact that I did not want him around seemed to attract him to be even further.

“Why, thank you!” Peter Lukas took his hat off finally, and wrung it in his hands. As if he was trying to appear a soft and well meaning gentleman, and not someone who killed people on his tug boat for fun. “Well, can you give me a light then? If we’re going to make a bad decision we might as well make them together. That’s what I always say.”

“You seem to say a lot of things.”

“And, I mean over half of them. I try to be honest, I mean. Well, try, and fail, but the trying’s the important part.”

“Mm.”

“A light? You know, and then god said give me light. Please, please, pretty please with sprinkles on talk.”

Peter Lukas reached into my pocket, and pulled out the carton of cigarettes I had on my person. He flipped the box open, and then carefully picked one up and popped it in his mouth. He stared, his eyes big and wide like the ocean.

They were blue eyes.  
Almost, unnervingly so.  
Blue eyes that reminded me of someone long dead.  
He had gotten so close I could smell the sea on his breath, like it was clinging to him. I wanted so badly to throw him overboard and let him drown in the cold water.

Instead, I closed the distance between us and pressed my cigarette butt to his, just long enough for a spark to connect between them and for one of them to light the other. He pulled away a cig between his two fingers, and a satisfied look on his face.

“Do you know why I came up to talk to you?”

“Talk to me? You sure have been talking /at/ someone. Perhaps, you are even talking in proximity of someone else. You make someone is there with you, but in fact I am far away.”

“Wow. You sure like the fake deep shit. Lemme guess you think you’re an expert on psychology because you read some Sigmund Freud, and now you’re good at pointing out that some people have bad parents.”   
  
_Well, not exactly. I’ve met the man himself. He was a terrible bore.  
  
_ “You just talk, and talk, and talk, and expect it to mean something. But it doesn’t. You’re just wasting everyone’s time.”

“Were you going somewhere with this?" I asked. I am a patient man. I have been waiting two hundred years. But that few minutes of conversation felt like 400. 

“Yeah, eventually.”

“You sound like someone who has never talked to another human being in his life.”

“Why, thank you.”

"Did you just crawl out from behind some rock and decide the first thing you would ever do was annoy me."

"Yes. How did you know? Let me guess you're psychic."

Ever since I was young I have been afraid of getting old. He looked so old, all of the color drained from his face, and yet there was never a man more comfortable being himself. Talking to him was like a blast of water straight to the face.

It woke me up, from whatever I have been dreaming of for the past two hundred years.

“I walked up to you, because you looked like you were the loneliest person at this party.”

It infuriated me, the fact that he insinuated he saw me. He saw through me, like I was smoke and fog. No one saw me, no one had in so long and I had made sure of that.

“You sound like a complete and total wreck of a human being.”

“Hm. That’s a rather mean thing to say. You keep insulting me. Are you trying to hint that maybe you don’t like me?”

“I’m not hinting I’m telling.”

“Telling me off then? You don’t want to spend some time alone together.”

“No, I would rather not. I’m a busy man.”

I stopped. My fingers loosened and I just let the cigarette fall away from my grip, and off the ledge. My fingers now empty, curled around the banister. I felt queasy, like the surface I was standing on was bobbing up and down with the waves and I needed something to hold onto.

He noticed.  
I hate that he kept noticing these things I would rather not let others see.

“Busy man. Busy, busy, busy, man. And so fussy too! I can’t play I’m too busy with my busy business.”

“Your impressions are terrible.”

“Mm, that’s because I don’t quite get people.”

“Me neither.” Even though I could see their deeper innermost thoughts I could never understand. I reached across the space between us and snatched the cigarette from his lips. I must have been more than tipsy, I must have been so drunk I was just about to fall, or throw myself over the bannister and into the crowd below, and my body would break and my limbs would scatter, and my blood would fly everywhere and I would hear everyone’s screams but it wouldn’t matter because I’m not Elias Bouchard I am just an old man, in an old withered body, watching from far, far away. I thought about all of this as I inhaled smoke, and thought the cigarette tasted like him. Then I looked back at him. “Do you want to dance?”

“No, I would rather not.”

You told me no.  
You looked away from me.  
That was interesting.  
It was the complete opposite of Barnabas, who always said yes, always looked at me.  
Peter you didn’t dance with me that night. Perhaps it was for the best you didn’t, I would have stepped on your toes.

Yours truly,  
Or maybe not so truly,  
Elias Bouchard.


	10. Letter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More old men flirting. Elias and Peter are kind of nasty to each other because they're both big meanies, but only because they're secretly fond of each other.

_ I found my martyr in my bed tonight. _ _   
_ _ Stops my bones from wondering, _ _   
_ _ Just who I, who I, who I am.  _ _   
_ _ Oh, who am I?  _

♟️

To my Dear Nowhere Man,   
No, I’m still not talking about Disney Land. Let’s talk about my three favorite topics instead, me, myself, and I. 

♟️   
  


Dig, dig, dig.    
I never quite got the appeal of the buried, you know? It’s so… dirty. 

The pointed end of the spade pierced the surface of the earth. You lifted the shovel and spilled all the crumbling dirt to the side. ‘

Of course I wasn’t going to dig the hole myself. I didn’t want to ruin my manicure. What are those big arms of yours for, anyway?    
  
Peter Lukas observed the cold body he was about to commit to the earth. Ice blue lips, and eyes the color of milk almost completely faded in death. He thought, what a lonely thing death was. He was so looking forward to it. 

“The great Elias Bouchard called for my help to get rid of a body. Are you sure this isn’t just some convoluted excuse just to see me?”   
  
“One, thank you for recognizing how great I am finally. Two, do you think I’m really so desperate I’d murder a man just to see you of all people?”   
  
“Hey, you said it, not me.”    
  
He went to pick up the body. Despite his large size a human body is always much, much heavier than one expects. Bodies always seem lighter than air, like they’re just shells to leave behind after transformation. People must have something inside of them, meat, or some such thing that makes it heavy. Other people. Not Peter. Not me.    
  
I crossed my arms, and rubbed up and down long spiderlike fingers on my upper arms to warm myself. There was something about seeing such cold blue skin that unnerved me. It felt like I had been sitting in an ice bath for hours. It was a perfectly humid day out, and I could see my breath. 

“I just don’t see why you couldn’t kill him yourself. You can’t take over the world with that kind of attitude. You gotta be a real go-getter, you know? That’s what my parents always taught me, or rather that’s what I imagine they would have taught me if I had ever seen them.”

“Killing random people is the work of petty crooks like yourself. I was born in the upper crust, to rule, and the ruler of the world always delegates.”    
  
“Says the guy who can’t even get his employees to like him.”   
  
“Running a business is harder than you think. I don’t just sit in a tug boat all day looking at the ocean, and uh… contemplate the majesty of the sea, or something… what do you even do?”    
  
“I keep telling you it’s not a tug boat.”    
  
Peter whined. He looked genuinely insulted. A big kid, frozen in time. He was locked away in his room for so long, so isolated. His only escape was to dream of becoming an adventurer and sailing the world. He had that now, but it felt empty, the same way a dream would, the mere product of his imagination.    
  
Other people just didn’t seem real to him.    
Like he was the only one that existed.   
That was why he could watch the face of a dead stranger disappear underneath the dirt it was buried in like it was nothing to him, when it still made me shudder   
  
“I dislike it.”

I averted my eyes slightly. Usually, he was the one breaking eye contact.    
  
“You dislike a lot of things Elias, you’re gonna have to be more specific.”    
  
“I dislike you.”    
  
“Flirting in front of some poor bloke’s grave, how macabre.” 

“I don’t like it.”   
  
Frustrated, I gestured towards the fresh earth. I waved my hands in big dramatic motions, to try to get out some of the feeling that had curled up within me like a snake in my breast.    
  
“Uh, the killing?” He tilted his head as oblivious as ever.   
  
“The death.”    
  
He reached into that coat of his and pulled out a box of cigarettes. He placed one to his lips, and lit it. He breathed it in and out, the smoke. Inhale, blue flowers, frosted flower petals, they tickle my throat as I swallow them. Exhale, ashes, and smoke and the wisp of some feeling leaves his lips.    
  
His lips they curl around the cigarette, and I find myself thinking I can’t kiss the boy I loved in my youth anymore because he’s been dead for two hundred years. His lips were like flower petals, and like flower petals they slowly rotted away until there was nothing left. So why did they even bloom in the first place, why was he always smiling? What was thereto smile about?    
  
Why smile at me? 

Peter pulled the cigarette out with his two fingers, and then placed it between my lips. I stared back at him annoyed and then exhaled smoke from my nose.    
  
“Funny thing to get upset about. Not funny ‘haha’ I guess, more like funny weird. Everything dies you know.”    
  
“I wish you would just die already.” 

I bitterly spat, along with the taste of tobacco on my lips.    
  
“Not yet.”   
  
Those were the words you were always saying. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. It always meant the same thing, just a little longer, we could waste a little more time together and procrastinate our inevitable end. 

♟️

I insisted we take the subway that night just to annoy you.    
You made everyone in our train car disappear, in what was the most petty use of your powers that I had ever seen.    
  
Peter Lukas didn’t like train cars, or boxes of any kind. He could not stand the idea of being packed anywhere with dozens of other people like sardines stuffed in a tin. He didn’t even like sardines all that much.    
  
“The shadow of death has always loomed over me. Always stuck to me.”    
  
“Oh please, Elias. I keep telling you, you’re not that special.” He reached forward and tapped the butt of his cigarette on the ceramic ash tray, sprinkling a few cinders. “If you die it’s because you’re the same as everyone else, not because death hates you in particular.”   
  
“I was a sickly child.”    
  
“Yep, yep, and that somehow justifies your desire to rule the world. Then, one time on the playground a kid was mean to you and kicked dirt in your face. When you were young you were always picked last for kickball and it made you feel worthless. I’ve heard it all before.”    
  
“It’s amazing how you manage to always say so much, and say absolutely nothing at all.”    
  
“It’s a talent of mine. Why would I ever tell someone what I really feel? I get scared just thinking about it.” He really did shiver. Of course, all his bumbling, all his rambling it was all an act. In his mind there was nothing more lonely than a fake friendliness, forced formalities. Everyone wears a mask all the time that they can never take off, it’s not just me, he once said.    
  
“I’m trying to tell you something I have never told anyone else before.”

The train car rattled. Sardines, squirming, their slimy skin bumping against each other, and then the walls as they tried to get out of that wretched place. He hated boxes, and being locked inside of them. The body was just another box. The body was a prison that you had to cram yourself into so tiny, you would need to dislocate your arms and legs and perform some feat of flexibility most circus freaks would never be capable of and even then you wouldn’t quite fit.    
  
“Oh? What? Am I supposed to feel special?”   
  
“You should feel honored.” I said, and then my eyes narrowed. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me. I have half a mind to strangle you right here.”   
  
“You won’t. You’d have to get your hands dirty.” He taunted, cigarette hanging from his open mouth. “I bet it’s that, it’s the touching. You’re all, you know… touchy. If you put your hands on them you’d have to feel the blood drain out of them, and the moment the heart stops, and it would finally feel real to you different from just watching.”   
  
“You make it seem like all I ever do is watch.”    
  
“You’re watching me right now, from behind your eyeballs. It’s like you got a personal theatre set up in your skull. You’re just munching on popcorn, enjoying it, like all of life is just a show put on to entertain you.”    
  
“Are you saying it isn’t?”    
  
“But sometimes it feels so vividly real to you, and that’s what you can’t stand.” 

When I was born they said I was stillborn. There was no pulse nor breathing. My father and mother had already given up on me. I had several older siblings, or would have had them, if they had not died in miscarriages and fresh out of the womb.    


I wasn’t treated sternly at all by father or mother. In fact I was pampered. I was their only son who had lived, and they were always so nervous, afraid to lose me. 

I didn’t cry when I was born. They thought I was stillborn, and surrounded me with flowers ready to bury me. I can remember every moment of my life now, and I can remember the overpowering scent of flowers even back then and maybe that’s why I loathe them even now. I couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t breathe, and yet I was still conscious. My first formative memory. I fought, back then. I fought to open my mouth and cry, to tell mother and father I was still alive and I’m still fighting even now.    
  
It’s like Peter said.    
Everything dies.    
I have perfect memory and I can’t even remember a single person whose murder I witnessed after the first. The butterfly’s wings, slowly decay. An inevitability. It’s their fault for being so beautiful, being like flowers. When the body dies everything is over.    
  
Only memories are eternal, immortal.    
That’s why I want to keep watching, and recording forever. I am a bad, bad, man and if there was a hell I certainly would be sent there. I wouldn’t mind it too much, eternal torture where every day I am cut apart, and burned alive I would at least be experiencing something, watching something, remembering something, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.    
  
What scares me is the small percent of a chance that a hell doesn’t exist.   
The lights will turn off and then there will be nothing.    
I can’t perceive nothing.    
I can’t even imagine what nothing is.    
  
I tried to tell you all of this but you wouldn’t listen. You are, even now, such a stubborn old fool. There were now several burnt up cigarette butts in the ash tray, and I was sitting at the edge of the bed.    
  
“You always talk about me like you know me. Do you?” 

I asked. I was just curious.    
  
“I don’t. No one does, really.”    
  
I didn’t realize we had been talking about the same thing all day. Conversations with him just flowed so naturally, like the way a river flowers to the ocean.    
  
“I am a great mystery.”   
  
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself. Nobody understands anybody.”He breathed, like he was the wind that propels the waves forward. “I’m sure you’ve got it in your pretty little head that I’m the only one just as wicked as you are and capable of understanding your… wretchedness. That’s how you would phrase it. But you know… yeah, you know, so.”   
  
“You think I’m pretty?” I said, and then. “Ah yes, I’m sure your experience is something you can project upon the entire human race.”   


“We don’t like each other, Elias. We tolerate each other. The same way people tolerate the taste of coffee, or cigarettes, or wine and convince themselves that they like it. And that’s the best anyone can ever hope for.”   
  
“Yes, yes, we get it. You have antisocial viewpoints.”    
  
My fingers stumbled for another cigarette and I knocked over the ash tray. I watched it fall over, watched the ashes fall into the carpet. I was so used to perceiving over a thousand details at once, it was rare for me to observe something so closely.    
  
I felt like I was inside my body when I was with him. It was an annoying feeling.    
  
“When I talk about you I’m really just talking about myself.” He said, and then curled his fingers in the air like he was trying to grab hold of the smoke in the room. It slipped through his fingers like everything did eventually. “I thought about the whole immortality thing once but it doesn’t appeal to me. I’m already the loneliest I’ll ever be right here, right now, with you someone I don’t even like. My life won’t change, it won’t get any better or worse than this.”    
  
“Have you ever thought your problem might just be you’re a terrible dullard?”    
  
He sat up, propping himself up by his elbow. “And what’s so interesting about your life, Elias? You watch people you don’t even care about die and feel no attachment to them. And if you succeed what? You’ll lock yourself up in your room forever, like an old man watching sitcoms on the telly all day?”   
  
“Hm.”    
  
“We act like we’re all about change because we transform our bodies into hideous monsters, but we don’t change, not at all. I was born like this, I’ll die like this, nothing makes me happier.”    
  
“I’ll kill you.”

I whispered it like it was a sweet nothing.    
  
“Please don’t, I’d prefer to die alone.” 

I intertwined my fingers. I wondered how I looked then. I was the furthest thing from a lover, I was some spider plotting, I was long and narrow and only barely resembling a human in shape and form.    
  
Or at least I wished I was.   
I wished I was less human.   
I wished I felt… less.. Of this…    
  
“Forever doesn’t have to be boring… I don’t have to be alone.” 

I said.   
Then I said something incredibly stupid.    
  
“You could be there with me?”    
  
Let’s fall in love, and get married, and rule the world together and be live happily ever after.   
I seriously want to vomit.    
  
Yours falsely,    
Elias Bouchard.    
  
  
  


  
  



	11. Letter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They finally go to Disney Land.

Dear Nowhere Man,   
  
Fine, I will talk about Disney Land.   
  
I hate being ignored far more than I hate talking to you, it turns out.   
  
I planned the trip. I made all the arrangements. You couldn’t do paperwork to save your life. I wanted to get a plane packed with other people to torment you, but I decided to be nice. (Yes, I am capable of being nice).   
  
I rented a car. Buick. Rickety Old thing. It somehow suited us more than any fancy car I could have easily afforded. The whole car creaked when you sat into the passenger seat and I laughed. You could barely cram yourself into the thing.   
  
“See there are some advantages to being short,” I said.   
  
“Then why are you always trying to wear those heels,” you said.   
  
“Because they look good on me,” I said.   
  
The two of us were crammed into same space, breathing each other’s air. I’ve been closer to you than anyone else, and kissed you so deeply so as to steal the air from your lungs, but you, awkward thing you, just can’t stand being in close proximity for anyone for long.   
  
“Of course I love it.”   
  
“No you don’t,” you said.   
  
“I do. I’m always surrounded by admirers,” I said.   
  
“Then you said. People fall in love with the image, not the real you. The same way people love a celebrity or an idol. You like that, because it enables closeness without proximity and you’re in love with yourself too, so all the flattery and praise helps, but most of all you’re lonely.” You said, and it was so droll. It sounded like you were reading right out of a psychology textbook. “It’s why you feel no connection to Jonah Magnus anymore, and why you’re losing your conenction with Elias Bouchard.” 

You put a cigarette in the car’s lighter (the car was old enough to have one) and watched it spark. You paused to take a long drag, as if to give the statement more weight.   
  
“It’s like I said when I first met you, you’re the loneliest person in the world.”   
  
“Then why am I here with you?” I asked it because I was genuinely curious.   
  
“Because, you’re loneliest when you’re with me.”   
  
“You’re really killing the mood. How am I supposed to go enjoy the happiest place on earth now?” I said as I sat with my arms extended out grasping the wheel, and staring at you with half lidded, tired eyes, because I had not slept in days you made sure of that.   
  
“I thought we were flirting,” you said looking innocent.   
  
Finally, all my machinations were coming to a head. You know me. I must plot and scheme over the littlest of things. Have you know, other people have accused me of being manipulative in the past?   
  
You’re too much, Jonah.   
Everyone said that, even Barnabas said it.   
If I’m too much, then you must be too little Peter.   
That’s why we work well together.   
  
“Nobody works well together, they just pretend to.”   
  
You remarked in a rather sulky mood as if you were reading my mind.   
Don’t do that, stop that. That’s my thing.   
  
Perhaps you were right. I thought of Barnabas. I really had tasted true love, and I didn’t like it. Now I was sipping something I knew was fake, and I simply couldn’t get enough of it. I looked at you, drinking you in, and felt like I could drink an entire ocean.   
  
You wore a huge hawaiin shirt that you left unbuttoned so I could see your silver chest hair, and Bermuda Shorts. I practically begged you to dress yourself properly and you refused. You had on great big flip flops, and I could see there was hair on your toes as well. Lovely.   
  
I wore what you refer to as my funeral suit. My hair slicked back with oil, my lips pulled back in a pointed smile. You said I looked like a vampire. “You just… You just always dress like you’re a vampire? Is that just an 1800s thing? Were you all just really into Dracula back then?” I didn’t know if it was a compliment, because I didn’t know if you were talking about the vampires we see on television or the real ones, the ones that scrape and suck with their fangs and long tongues and slurp blood into their distended bellies. “Hey, hey, how come everybody else gets the sexy vampires that make dreamy eyes at you and we get the weirdo sentient leeches?” This is what happens when I don’t reply you just keep talking and talking.   
  
“I don’t know, I don’t really bother with the hunt. It bores me.”   
  
“Everything bores you, Elias.” 

You got out of the car then and smiled confidently even though I knew you hated crowds. You pretended to love them. “There’s nowhere lonelier than in the center of a crowd of people who don’t really give a shit about you.” You pretended to love a lot of things.   
  
We walked past the gift shop, and you practically begged. I said no. You said yes. I said no. You said yes. We sounded like children, and I was the first one to lose my patience and give up.   
  
A few minutes later we walked out of the shop and you had on a pair of mouse ears that barely fit your giant head. You took them off, and put them on my head, and I frowned. It bothered me seeing you enjoy yourself so much, how dare you.   
  
We went on a few rides and you hated waiting in line, but you loved the actual rides themselves. You screamed with laughter and I sat there stone faced next to you. Until the ride was over when I ran to the trash can, bent over, and hurled out the contents of my stomach.   
  
“Very dignified Elias. You look like the king of this world.”   
  
I would have said something really witty as a retort, but I was busy then. Then, the parade came and my plan was finally coming together. You didn’t want to watch the parade surrounded by people but I pulled your hand and urged you forward.   
  
You were swept up in the waves, throngs and throngs of people and all of them faceless. Have you ever looked someone in the eyes for more than five seconds, Peter? Have you ever understood what someone else was feeling just once in your life?   
  
We spilled out from the crowd and into the main street. For a moment it looked like the float was going to hit us, but then it came to a slow stop. I dropped on my knees and reached into my pocket for a box that I’d been concealing in the inside pocket of my jacket the entire time.   
  
I pulled out a silver ring.   
_For the one I want to rule the world with._   
Was the engraving.   
  
I thought what would annoy you most in this world, and I realized a public proposal, in front of a crowd for all to see, forcing you to talk about your feelings on the spot, the obligation of everyone’s eyes watching you, bearing down on you.   
  
I timed it perfectly. Your head tilted back as you tried to look at anywhere except right in front of you. You gazed up at the night sky. The sky was just a reflection of the ocean, and some sailors went mad and could no longer tell the difference between the two. You wanted to be alone right now. You wanted to be alone. You wanted it to be quiet.   
  
Then the fireworks started. In colorful letters in the air it spelled out.

_Will You Marry Me, Peter?_

That was when you ran away.  
A fully grown man running away.   
I laughed until the tears started to come out.   
  
But now that you’re ignoring me to punish me afterwards for ruining our disneyland vacation, I’ve come to realize this: I want to be lonely, but I don’t want to be alone.   
  
So, let me end this long and rambling series of letters the same way it began. Here I am, asking in private just between the two of us. If you want you can burn these letters afterwards. They’ll only exist in my memory. They’ll exist forever in my memory. I’ve written down every single thing I’ve felt, painted you a portrait for me, and aren’t I beautiful?   
  
It’s only us, here.   
You and I are the last two people alive on earth. We’ve killed everyone else.   
Now, I ask you.   
  
Will You Marry Me, Peter?   
  
You don’t have to respond. Just know, I will be really, really, really, really, annoyed if you don’t.   
  
Love,   
Elias Bouchard. 

♟️  
  
Dear Elias Bouchard,   
  
Yes.   
  
Love,   
Peter Lukas

  
  


♟️

Dear Nowhere Man,   
  
I write all of that and you give me one word?   
You are the most boring man on earth, and somehow I haven’t gotten bored of you. It’s a miracle really.   
  
With begrudging love,   
Your fiance Elias Bouchard.   
  
  



End file.
